


The Absence of Such

by billspilledquill



Category: MARS～ただ君を愛してる～ | Mars: Tada Kimi wo Aishiteru (2016), Mars - Souryo Fuyumi
Genre: Ableist Language, Angst, F/M, M/M, Mental Health Issues, no one is kind to each other this is mars we are talking about
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 11:40:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30021231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: They meet again. It wasn't rehearsed: Rei was simply walking back home, and Makio was dying in the streets.
Relationships: Asou Kira/Kashino Rei, Kashino Rei/Kirishima Makio
Comments: 12
Kudos: 3





	The Absence of Such

**Author's Note:**

> This is a mix of drama and mangaverse. It will probably have two chapters?  
> A huge thank you to Alyssa for giving me the energy I needed to write for this fandom again, which is a curse and a blessing all the same. Would definitely have gifted this fic to them if they had an AO3 account, but here I am giving a shout-out!

_At the same time, boredom is inhuman because it robs human life of meaning, or possibly it is an expression of the fact that such a meaning is absent._

Lars Fredrik Händler Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom

Sei didn’t know. Sei thought that he was like him, kind and easy, malleable as long there was a bone to bite. People that lended the other cheek, that licked the salt off the hand that fed. Sei thought these things and Makio was glad, but he couldn’t help to be a little bored by it. 

They would sit for hours on end. Sei liked drawing and Makio didn’t care for it. Sei sat and was boring and his brother would come to visit him. Makio stayed where he was and listened to his heart dragged out its beat, trying to discern if the footsteps from the corridor were from Sei’s brother. The beat dragged on and on and on until Rei comes in.

Rei. Kashino Rei.

 _Rei_ , Makio turned the name in his mouth, swirled the words in his tongue, bit on them as though he was allowed to. In prayers, believers only whisper.

Sei said Rei’s name usually after crying.

When Sei cried, Rei’s eyes would soften, his entire body leaning towards him. Words will stop coming out of Rei’s mouth, the cruel ones, anyway, the ones that matter. Makio looked from the corner of the art room, at a safe distance, touched the corner of his eyes, finding it dry. Makio tried to pinpoint a moment where tears have found themselves in. He remembered blood.

“Rei sees me cry all the time,” Sei said. “I have never seen him cry.”

Makio imagined Rei crying. He didn’t like it. “Sei is kind,” he settled on. 

“Rei is kind as well. He just doesn’t show it.”

Makio reminded him that Rei had broken the bully’s fingers, and for his troubles, went to the principal’s office.

Sei smiled shyly at him, a faded bruise on his face. It was stupid for bullies to go for the face, Makio thought. “I have never seen Makio cry, though. There’s just me. It’s pathetic, isn’t it?”

 _Yes_. “Sei has more heart than most of us.”

Sei’s smile grew. He liked what he heard. 

Sei didn't know Makio had killed a man. Even he forgot it sometimes. Aoki Yuuji was his best friend and liked to stomp his foot on his back. To make a pretty curve, he said.

It wasn’t too memorable, the blood in his eyes, the pitiful taunts. It was so very dark, and a figure turned in his mind ever since that day. The lamplights were red. Makio’s vision was red when Rei stooped down from the place where he was resting.

It was days before he killed Aoki in self-defence. Rei saved him from dying. Rei was annoyed because he was sleeping there, and the noise had woken him up.

People around seemed to know him. Makio was busy blinking the blood away, trying to look up from the ground. He wanted to see. He had wanted to hear. His mind was buzzing and he heard _Rei, Rei, Rei._

Kashino Rei.

“Can you get up?”

People were on the ground, now. Makio got rid of the blood, but he couldn’t get up. His arms were fractured, bent in strange angles. Rei helped him.

“Get up, come on.”

He pulled at his arm, rudely, without care, and Makio saw the most beautiful man he had ever seen.

“Can you get home by yourself?”

Makio was covered in blood; his arms were numb. He nodded.

“Trouble,” was the word Rei left him with. Makio watched him go, his gaze unwavering to the red dot on the horizon until it disappeared.

Sei and Kira are not so different from each other. Makio was at home and dug his fingers in his palm, trying to understand why Rei would choose them instead.

Kindness. Rei valued kindness. He valued what he didn’t have and disgusted Makio with all the rhetoric. There was another feeling somewhere, something that made Makio pause when he went over to the rooftops, gazing down. If his corpse were down there instead of Sei’s, Rei would not have batted an eye to it.

Rei disappeared. Makio almost destroyed god by making Sei jump. Makio went crazy, as his parents got news of it when their monthly phone-call wasn’t answered. Makio was confined to a room when Rei disappeared.

But he found him, after searching, after digging his fingers into skin and letting it dry against blood. He found him. He found him and he was beautiful. Rei let him call him by his name and smiled a smile that made Makio wanted to carve it on his skin.

Kira was plain. Kira looked like the same other people he has passed over in a school corridor, at the art club; those that were afraid to stand out, that were scared of themselves, that did not mind killing in dreams. People like her are plenty. People like Sei.

“Why it wasn’t _you_ that did it, Kira? I’m your boyfriend!”

Makio let his knuckles graze over his lips that had touched Rei with. He saw Kira’s flush; Rei’s indignation at being kissed by a man rather than by his girlfriend. Makio saw; he stared.

Rei cared about him a little. Rei didn’t like him when he confronted him. Rei wouldn’t care too much, like one wouldn’t care for wasted paper, for splattered ink. Rei didn’t care about him enough to hate him.

Makio closed his eyes and dug deeper, his eyes wide, until he forgot he was awake. 

If the sky would be as blue, then the world might be an even worse place to live in. Funny was the idea of people as dominos, a single standing vertebra, meeting its end by tumbling one against the other, the bones cracking like the jittering of teeth in a cold night. But that was the thing. People wouldn’t see; they have no time for an imperfect sky. 

If only the sky is that blue, Makio lamented inside his head.

Rei was next to his girlfriend. Makio was painting a sky so blue that the teacher might give him a poor grade. _I_ _have asked for a realistic painting_. 

Rei talked. Rei’s voice reached him like water reaches a fish, the osmosis of thought and air. Makio’s skin rose at the sound of it, his grills, his pores. 

He almost closed his eyes and thought of fishes, let himself see the red and white swimming against the current, but Rei was next to his girlfriend. Rei was next to him. 

“Makio,” Rei said. 

His eyes were wide open. 

“What are you drawing?” Rei said, then. He asked her, he was turning away from him. This room was made of two people and four walls, undried paintings, and an undone portrait of a sky, then a fish, swimming under. “Do you want to go out for a movie after?”

She said yes. Rei turned back to him. There was one more person in the room, now, and Makio felt his blood aflame. His brush rattled in the water cup, shaking it as he dried it to tap into the white paint. He was going to paint the clouds, soon. 

“Makio,” Rei said. “That’s a nice picture you have here.”

Makio didn’t need to look at Rei to know that he is beautiful. There was a whole world in that understanding. The connective tissues that shape the organs that hold them; the epithelial tissue, the keratinocytes moving beneath the skin like a hissing curse. There was truth in knowing what is beautiful and what is alive, the workings of a body; the microcosmos that went unspoken; the filaments. The koi fishes swam inside his head, one of them sauntered away from the water, its scales glistening brightly against some kind of light.

Makio thanked him, permitted himself to look. Rei’s teeth were so pretty. 

“It’s a portrait.”

Rei’s head tilted awkwardly, perhaps to see it from another angle. “Eh, I don’t know. Looks like a sky for me.”

“It is.”

“The portrait of a sky, then,” Rei said. Makio hummed, his brush coming to form a cloud at the top left of the canvas. His vein jumped under his wrist; so blue. 

Rei was never been interested in art despite being one himself. His girlfriend was painting Rei, her eyes bright, her voice soft. Makio can touch it if he wants to. If he wanted, he could close his eyes and see her heart. The aortic valve carrying the blood squeezes the heart dry. Force a knife in, let it bleed in cadence. 

If he wanted; if he wants. To be fair, Makio was willing to kill for a lot of things. 

“See you,” Kira said. Rei didn’t say anything to him. He chatted with her about the movie, the actress, some forlorn scandal behind the scenes, and disappointed Makio in his humanness.

Makio was holding a knife and cut clouds in the sky, the blue that went with it. There was one fish in a bowl. It forgot that it is in a bowl; it swims and swims and swims. White on white, Makio painted the clouds in circles. 

“No,” Makio said. “It makes no difference.” 

The woman sighed. The white of her eye was bright, and Makio focused on that light in a windowless room. The room had four walls; a fish dries itself on land because it was bored with its bowl; by the absence of memory. A fish flailed the same. It forgot why it was bored in the first place. 

Makio thought, had thought. Under his skin, there was blood, water, amidst the midget dwarfgoby, flocks of fish gathering to sea. There was a world there that Makio did not account for, and he almost closed his eyes. His eyes, pearls and mouth, salt. 

“Did you feel anything for Kashino Rei?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Thought, reasoning, bodily reactions,” she said. “Feelings.”

“Ah,” Makio said. She sighed again, tapped against her tables; Makio liked her enough. He has always liked people who understand silence. She took a breath. Makio waited.

“I mean when you drove a knife in his stomach.” 

Makio said yes.

“Kashino-kun’s father asked me to conduct a test on you in private. Your parents are unreachable on the phone, but they have left a note to your doctor that we would be allowed to take charge in case of emergencies. I will be evaluating whether you will return to the hospital, Kirishima-kun.” 

“Whether I can hold a conversation,” Makio said, “civilly, I suppose.” 

“Among others.” 

“I won’t hurt you,” he said. He didn’t care much about hurting people. There was no joy in killing anymore there was in being in this room, talking to her.

She frowned. “It is a misconception that people hold, that mentally-ill people are more violent than those that are not.” 

Makio wondered if one can die from boredom. “Do you think I am insane?” 

“That’s not the right term.”

Makio was dying. “Ill, then.”

The pen kept hitting the sheet. She was writing in a room with a fish dying on land, Makio thought. _Do you_ , she will whisper to it, not knowing that the fish cannot hear. The fish can’t even remember. 

“Do you?” she whispered, she asked. Of course she did. Makio was starting to dislike her. 

“I suppose that is why I am here.” 

“Yes,” she said. “That’s why I am talking to you.” 

And they kept talking in circles. They talked in the same way clouds are formed; Makio questioning her, she, him, the questioning turns, swims. Makio wondered if two people must have something to hide to speak. He had nothing to hide; he closed his eyes. The walls disappeared, and words, words hit block by block until they collapsed into a heap of ash. His tongue tasted like it. 

“And this world you are talking about, Kirishima-kun,” she said. She was writing, the pen taps; the fish dries, the bones shimmering, silk, like a too sharp knife into a too heavy heart. “Do you believe it is true?”

“I don’t believe in anything but power.”

“Would you elaborate on that?” 

“The world needs powerful people. This world is built on power.” 

“And what is this—“ she scribbled in her pad one like would sketch on paper. “This world that you are talking about?” 

Makio didn’t find it imperative to make her notice that she is stupid. He mumbled something; she let that thread of thought go. People like her are easily persuaded. Manipulable. 

She started again, “Why don’t you tell me a little bit about Kashino Rei, Kirishima-kun?” 

“He was a classmate.”

“Yes.”

“I stabbed him.”

“That is also correct.”

“What else is there to know?”

“Your former classmate tells me that you were… enamoured with him. He did not reciprocate.” 

“I suppose.”

“Is this why you sought to harm him?”

Makio laughed. “You must know why,” he said. “You are giving me clues. You are leading. There is an answer that you want me to spit out.” He inclined in his chair, drowned in and out of another world. It’s all procedures. _Kirishima exhibited dangerous behaviour. Recommend another week of observation_.

“Well, where do you think I am trying to lead you to?” 

“You want to hear about love. Some kind of reasoning behind this.” Makio felt like the wall, white and stale and strikingly bored.

“And there is,” she said. From the whiteness of her eyes, Makio seemed to detect something akin to pity.

Makio got out, in the end. His parents could not be reached and Rei’s father decided to not pursue legal action. His parents didn’t live in Japan anyway. Makio supposed that the money will stop coming in, maybe he will be evicted from his apartment. Makio imagined his parents disfigured in a car crash, the flesh, the blood. Most probably, they are alive and happy, their face clean and pretty. He couldn’t quite remember what they looked like.

Makio walked out of the hospital. It was so bright. Makio squinted his eyes towards the sun.

He walked with no destination in mind. 

* * *

It was a normal day, of course. All bad things stem from normalcy. Rei was talking to his father about the usual, _no, dad, I don’t want to take up your business in LA, I’m happy here,_ when the snowstorm hit Kyoto and people around him hurried home. Children screamed in delight as their parents tugged them from their sleeves and pulled them in the car, their voices carrying miles on end, to the point that Rei had to decide that the conversation was over, and hit the end call button after a half-hearted goodbye.

Lucky, in a way, that snowstorm. Rei had now an excuse to go home. He crossed his hands over his chest and rushed to his car. Unlucky, too, because a man—or a boy— was curling himself into a ball in the corner of the coffee shop he was passing by. While not particularly compassionate, Rei wanted to get rid of the bag of bagels he had half-eaten for lunch today, and so he walked towards him.

“There. It’s cold.” He pulled out some coins. “Get yourself some drink if you can.”

That was the end of a relatively normal day when the man (definitely a man, not a boy; he was his age) looked up. It was a face that was familiar.

He looked older. Of course he did. It had been two years since they last met, and the last time they met was when Kirishima Makio had driven a knife in his stomach. But the age wasn’t what had perturbed him—surprisingly, it wasn’t even the memory that made him stare—it was Kirishima’s eyes; the way he looked at him.

Rei had the bag in mid-air. Kirishima slowly stirred, his eyes staring at the brown bag with no intent behind his eyes. He held up a hand as if to take it. The action reminded Rei of numerous facts. Namely that this man had tried to kill him. He had tried to kill Kira. He was Sei’s best friend. He was—

“A retard,” Rei said. He flung the bag to the nearby trash can—it didn’t quite hit the mark. The snow kept falling. Kirishima let his hand drop, slowly, and did not reply.

Rei stood in front of him for a long enough time for the snow to gather on his coat. Kirishima closed his eyes, as though asleep. Did he even know who he was? Or he forgot about him, just like that, after almost killing him without a second of hesitation? Why did they let him live out in the street? He was a threat to society; he was a threat to him.

“Makio,” he called. “Kirishima Makio.”

But Kirishima did not speak. People were hurrying home without the knowledge that such a threat existed. If Rei weren’t this close to him, he would have thought him dead. Deaths that would not be reported in the news. Kirishima could be dead and no one would care. Maybe he should let him die. Maybe he already is.

The thought frightened him. He didn’t want this man to die here, god knows what he might be up to. He stooped down, hesitated, then slowly, slowly, reached Kirishima’s pulse point.

It was beating; it was slow.

“Damnit,” Rei cursed. His hood had fallen from his head as he bent down to scoop Kirishima up, the latter not even twitching. His eyes opened slightly, and the light of recognition there had made Rei so happy that he forgot who Kirishima was and what he did, for a brief moment in time. He forgot everything for a time and carried Kirishima home.

He weighed nothing, Rei thought, holding him just a little tighter, just in case if he crumbled in his hands into a pile of ashes, as people did in his dreams.

It was only when he reached home that he realized that what he had done was sort of, kind of, a bad idea. As he tried to no avail to retrieve the key from his pockets with a grown man in his arms, Kirishima made a sound. His hand pushed softly against his chest, almost like a lover. This gesture was lost to Rei, however, because Kirishima talked, for the first time since they met again.

“Let me down.”

Soft. It didn’t even sound like an order. It seemed to Rei now that it was a better decision to have left Kirishima freeze to death in the streets. But Rei let him down and reached for his keys.

The door opened, carefully at first. Rei took off his shoes and noticed that Kirishima wasn’t doing anything except staring at the wall.

“You, uh,” Rei said. It wasn’t like he wanted to invite him in. “Makio?”

Kirishima’s head snapped back to him. He blinked, nodded, as though acknowledging that yes, it is him. Funny because it was hard to forget the man that tried to kill you. It is funny in an unfunny kind of way. Habit to use his first name. Habit to see the familiar glint in Kirishima’s eyes and be oddly comforted by it.

If only Kirishima had died before he met him again. The thought sprung in his mind, and Rei let it stay there as he opened the door.

“Come in,” Rei said.

Kirishima seemed surprised. As he probably should, but this was the first human emotion Rei had detected in him in their whole way home. The surprise dimmed, shrunk into a sort of resignation that looked jarring on him. Kirishima waited for Rei to him before entering carefully, step by step. Rei only then noticed that Kirishima didn’t wear shoes.

Odd, odd, odd. Kirishima Makio had always been distant, even before he went crazy on him and his friends. The pride in him seems to shrink as much as his words. Something vicious was gone in Kirishima, and Rei didn’t know whether to be grateful or angry, because it was that same viciousness that almost killed him in the first place.

It wasn’t any of his business.

Rei watched Kirishima walk to a corner; he didn’t seem compelled to sit. Kirishima scanned the room with a bored eye, and that boredom detained something about the past Kirishima that made Rei clench his teeth in anticipation. It was hard to be mad at an invalid. Kirishima’s eyes landed on him and startled him back into something precarious again.

“You know me,” Rei said. “Right?” It was a dumb question, but Kirishima nodded anyway. “When was the last time you ate?”

Kirishima shook his head.

“Do you want to eat?”

Kirishima blinked. _When was the last time he was presented with a choice?_ Rei wanted to ask, but that seemed too friendly, too knowing. “I don’t mind,” Kirishima said, then said quickly, in a ragged whisper, “If Rei doesn’t mind.”

“If I want you to eat?” Rei scoffed. “Do you think I want to you die?”

Silence. Kirishima’s body was a stilling frame. Rei couldn’t reply to that. “Take some spare clothes in my bedroom,” Rei said. He couldn’t quite believe what he was saying, and Kirishima didn’t seem to understand it, too. “You are drenched. Take a shower. I will call for dinner.”

Saccadic, spasmodic sentences. Short, to the point. Rei needed control. Kirishima was a reckoning. “Go,” he ordered. Kirishima followed.

When the shower started running on the other side of the apartment, Rei had to agree with the rational part of his brain that this was possibly the worst decision that he had made in his entire life. Not even Sei can rival the way he welcomed a lunatic in his house and offered dinner to. When the shower stopped and footsteps were heard, Rei was starting to ponder on the possibility that maybe even in another life he would not have made a more terrible decision than this.

“I ordered some food. Spicy is fine?”

Kirishima nodded, his hair dripping. He looked younger, then, almost a boy. Rei’s clothes looked odd on him, the shoulders too small and the waist too large. Kirishima wasn’t looking at him.

Rei said, “Give me the towel.”

Kirishima opened his mouth—Rei snatched the towel away and let it fall unceremoniously on Kirishima’s dripping head. “I swear,” Rei said, “you have no idea how to dry your hair, do you?” Rei made a show in moving the towel in different directions. Kirishima’s hair ended spiked up. Rei laughed, satisfied to see Kirishima’s dumbfounded face. He helped him to adjust his hair back in place.

“Next time clean it well,” Rei said, still on the verge of another laugh. “I wouldn’t want you dripping all over the floor—”

Maybe it was Kirishima’s eyes, strangely bright and moving, that made him remember himself. Maybe it was the deep flush down his neck, the soft glow of his skin or anything else that Kirishima Makio was doing at the time that made him took an abrupt step back. The towel fell between them.

Kirishima stared at it, picked it up slowly. He handed the towel to him, his cheeks pink.

“Put,” Rei said. His voice cracked in the middle. He was aware that he sounded a bit stupid. “Put the thing back in the bathroom. It’s gross.”

Kirishima folded it. Went to the bathroom. Came back in enough time to make Rei guilty. “Take a seat,” he said. Kirishima did.

That annoyed him. “Say something, for god’s sake. Are you going to turn around three times and wait for me to give you a treat?”

Kirishima didn’t move from his seat at all. He seemed as frozen in a snowstorm as in Rei’s house. He moved his lips, as though to test the sound of it.

“How,” Kirishima said. His voice was harsh, small, vicious. “How’s Aso-san?”


End file.
